Abstract
In clinical practice polysaccharides from herbal medicines are conventionally prepared by boiling water extraction (BWE), while ultrasound-assisted extraction (UAE) has often been used instead employed in laboratory research due to its strong extraction ability and efficiency. However, if and how the polysaccharides obtained by UAE and BWE are comparable, and hence whether the UAE-based research is instructive for the actual usage of herbal polysaccharides still requires further evaluation. To address this issue, here we chemically analyzed and compared the UAE- and BWE-obtained polysaccharides from three herbal medicines, i.e., Ginseng Radix, Astragali Radix and Dendrobii Officinalis Caulis. Then, the spike recovery of two series of standard dextran and pullulan by UAE and BWE was tested. The results showed that the polysaccharides from the herbal medicines by UAE were quantitatively and qualitatively different with those by BWE. The powerful extraction ability and polysaccharide degradation caused by ultrasound collectively contributed to these differences. It was then revealed that not only the UAE conditions but also the polysaccharide structures could affect the extraction ability and polysaccharide degradation. Given these, we highly recommended that the effects of UAE on polysaccharides from herbal medicines should be first carefully considered before employing it in relevant chemical and pharmacological analysis.
Highlights
IntroductionPolysaccharides have been becoming progressively appreciated as some of the most important kinds of chemical ingredients in herbal medicines due to their various medicinal values, such as anticancer [1], immune regulation [2], hyperglycemic [3,4] and prebiotic-like effects [5].Intensive research interests have been focused on polysaccharides in herbal medicines.nowadays natural polysaccharide research still suffers from multidisciplinary methodological bottlenecks: structural elucidation [6], quality control [7], in vivo detection [8] and in vivo molecular target exploration [9,10,11]
We chemically investigated and compared the polysaccharides obtained by ultrasound-assisted extraction (UAE) and boiling water extraction (BWE) from the three herbal medicines by phenol-sulphuric acid analysis and high performance gel permeation chromatography coupled with charged aerosol detector (HPGPC-CAD) analysis
In order to compare the UAE- and BWE-obtained polysaccharides under the maximum extraction ability of the two methods, the conditional parameters for UAE and BWE were optimized by response surface methodology (RSM) with Box-Behnken design (BBD) and repeated boiling, respectively
Summary
Polysaccharides have been becoming progressively appreciated as some of the most important kinds of chemical ingredients in herbal medicines due to their various medicinal values, such as anticancer [1], immune regulation [2], hyperglycemic [3,4] and prebiotic-like effects [5].Intensive research interests have been focused on polysaccharides in herbal medicines.nowadays natural polysaccharide research still suffers from multidisciplinary methodological bottlenecks: structural elucidation [6], quality control [7], in vivo detection [8] and in vivo molecular target exploration [9,10,11]. Polysaccharides have been becoming progressively appreciated as some of the most important kinds of chemical ingredients in herbal medicines due to their various medicinal values, such as anticancer [1], immune regulation [2], hyperglycemic [3,4] and prebiotic-like effects [5]. Intensive research interests have been focused on polysaccharides in herbal medicines. Herbal medicines were generally prepared by repeated water boiling. In traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), decoctions (boiled water extracts) are the most commonly used medication form for disease treatment [13,14]. In long-term clinical practice, polysaccharides obtained by boiling water extraction (BWE) are the effective
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